For Gail Huff and Bruce Mann, very different campaign roles

One is an outgoing television reporter and former model, as comfortable in front of a camera as her politician husband. The other, a soft-spoken college professor who never imagined being in the public eye.

For most of the state's high-profile U.S. Senate race, the spouses of Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and Democrat Elizabeth Warren have played vastly different roles in their significant other's election bids.

Gail Huff, who for years was the more recognizable half in her 26-year marriage to Brown, took a leave of absence from a TV news job in Washington, D.C., to campaign full time. She has starred in campaign ads and zig-zagged across the state vouching for her husband on a range of women's issues.

Bruce Mann, a Harvard Law School professor who married Warren 32 years ago, has spent much of his wife's campaign in the background. That has changed recently, with Mann attending a number of campaign events throughout the state, including Fitchburg and Leominster, to talk to people about Warren and the issues she cares about.

Last Thursday, Mann held a campaign stop at a 70th birthday party at the Citywide Community Center in Cambridge. As Frank Sinatra music filled the room, he made his way from table to table, chatting up white-haired men and women.

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Neither the center's receptionist nor a group of seniors in the front lobby knew who Mann was until a reporter specified, "Elizabeth Warren's husband." Even then, the receptionist said she did not know what he looked like.

"Maybe that's him?" she asked, gesturing to an elderly man who was not, in fact, Bruce Mann.

During a brief interview, Mann appeared calm and thoughtful, seeming to choose his words carefully.

Mann said people see his role in the campaign as "rounding out the family image." He added, "We've been married for a very long time, and I really couldn't imagine doing anything but supporting her."

Warren married Mann in 1980, four years after her divorce from her first husband, NASA mathematician Jim Warren. Warren has two children, daughter Amelia and son Alex, from her first marriage.

Mann said voters enjoy meeting someone who is close to Warren. It gives them a better sense of who she is.

"People are unfailingly cheerful," he said. "They're pleased to meet her husband. They tend to tell me to wish her well and that they're rooting for her."

Although he never expected to be involved in a high stakes political campaign, Mann said he has found the experience "surprisingly fun." He recalled his first campaign stop, at a small town hall in Beckett, in which he introduced himself to five people sitting around a table who were not expecting him.

"I just sat down and we had a just a lovely conversation about the issues that were important to them, and that's when I first realized that this was going to be something very special and something unlike anything I've done before," he said.

Years of reporting on snowstorms and other breaking-news events have made Huff a familiar face throughout the region.

While visiting Chantilly Place, a bridal shop in downtown Lowell in September, Huff and owner Colleen Ferry talked about trends in wedding dresses, with Huff describing her dress style when she married Brown in 1986. A campaign worker showed a photo from the wedding, and Ferry told Huff she looked the same now as she did then.

"I love you," Huff said, laughing and hugging Ferry.

During a recent interview at a Lowell café, a woman approached Huff and introduced herself as a Brown supporter. She said her daughter, a student at Northeastern University, had recently started volunteering in one of Brown's campaign offices.

"It's so nice to meet you in person," she told Huff.

Huff worked for WCVB-TV, Channel 5, for 17 years, until Brown's election to the Senate in 2010. While her high-profile job has made campaigning easier, Huff believes the media has been harder on her husband because many reporters know her personally and do not want to appear biased.

"That's your biggest fear (as a reporter), that the viewer or a reader is going to say this candidate is getting preferential treatment because the wife knows, or is in the same business with colleagues," she said. "If anything, they're overly cautious."

Huff now works at a television station in Washington, D.C., covering crime, courts, and general interest stories. She thinks her experience campaigning will make her a better journalist.

"I see what happens when reporters don't check facts, when they don't get back, when there are just open-ended questions," she said.

The Brown campaign has been airing an TV ad featuring Huff and her two daughters, Ayla and Arianna. The commercial is a direct appeal to women voters, which recent polls suggest support Warren.

In the 31-second video, Huff calls it "sad" that Warren and her supporters are "avoiding issues like jobs and the economy." Huff says her husband is pro-choice, supports women's health care, and is for "good jobs with equal pay."

Huff bristles at the mention of a "war on women," a political catch phrase often used to attack Republicans' views on contraceptives, abortion and gender equality.

"It's only a war if people believe that, and I think the only one that believes that is the media," she said.

While the Brown campaign sees Huff as a valuable asset in courting the female vote, Mann's role has been less defined.

Meg Bond, a professor of psychology and director of the Center for Women and Work at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said female politicians, like Warren, have "tricky" paths to navigate when deciding how to use their husbands in a campaign.

"The tough spot for a woman in a campaign like this is she has to come off looking very strong in her own right," said Bond. "The partner often in a campaign is often viewed as a help-mate, and that's a role that fits for a man to have a woman in that kind of role, even though I think Scott Brown's wife is a very strong independent woman."

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